영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Economists have long debated whether prosperity and environmental quality are fundamentally ①opposed, or whether the relationship between them changes shape as an economy matures. The Environmental Kuznets Curve, a hypothesis borrowed from earlier theories of income inequality, proposes that pollution initially ②rises alongside economic growth before eventually declining once a society crosses a certain threshold of wealth. In its early stages, industrializing nations ③prioritize output over conservation, treating clean air and water as expendable costs of development to be addressed later. Beyond a certain point, however, rising incomes generate both the technological capacity and the political will to demand ④more lenient regulation, so degradation begins to reverse even as production keeps expanding. Some scholars regard this trajectory as a ⑤reassuring paradox, suggesting that the very growth blamed for ecological harm may eventually finance its own repair. Critics, by contrast, argue that the curve rests on a narrow selection of pollutants that happen to decline with wealth, while ignoring greenhouse gases and resource depletion, which show no comparable tendency to fall.

When people are asked to judge how risky or beneficial a particular technology is, they ①often conduct anything resembling a careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they consult a quick emotional impression, an ②instinctive sense of whether the technology feels good or feels bad, and let that impression guide their entire judgment. This mental shortcut, known as the affect heuristic, produces a ③curious pattern that traditional risk theory struggles to explain: activities people like tend to be judged as both safer and more beneficial, while activities they dislike are judged as both riskier and less beneficial, even when no logical relationship between risk and benefit exists. For example, when researchers presented a fictional industrial chemical alongside a brief description emphasizing its convenience, participants rated it not only as more useful but also, ④illogically, as less dangerous. Because emotional impressions form so rapidly and feel so trustworthy, correcting for this heuristic requires ⑤deliberate effort; simply presenting more accurate statistics to already anxious or enthusiastic audiences rarely changes their underlying judgment.

Behavioral economists have long observed that people tend to feel the pain of losing something more ①intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount, a tendency known as loss aversion. Consider an investor who refuses to sell a declining stock, clinging to the hope that its price will eventually ②recover, even when all available evidence indicates that selling and reinvesting elsewhere would be more rational. Such behavior, though it appears ③rational from a purely economic standpoint, becomes understandable once we recognize that the investor is trying to avoid the sharp discomfort associated with realizing a loss. Similarly, consumers often demand a much ④higher price to give up an item they already own than they would be willing to pay to acquire the same item in the first place. As a result, loss aversion frequently pushes individuals toward decisions that ⑤minimize potential regret over losses rather than toward outcomes that maximize their overall welfare.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure in which a central watchtower allows a single guard to observe every cell, while inmates can never determine whether they are actually being watched at any given moment. French theorist Michel Foucault later transformed this architectural idea into a broader theory of power, arguing that the mere possibility of being observed is often sufficient to produce obedient behavior, since _______________. Foucault extended this logic beyond prisons to schools, hospitals, and workplaces, suggesting that modern institutions increasingly rely on continuous, often invisible observation rather than physical force to maintain order.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on _______________, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to.

It would be comforting to believe that anything sufficiently large or obvious appearing within our field of vision will automatically capture our attention, yet decades of research into inattentional blindness suggest otherwise. (A) This failure does not stem from a defect in the eyes, which register the stimulus perfectly well, but from the fact that conscious perception depends heavily on where attention has been directed. (B) When people are absorbed in a demanding task, such as counting how many times a ball is passed between players, they frequently fail to notice an unexpected and conspicuous event unfolding in plain sight, even something as unlikely as a person in a costume walking through the scene. (C) Policymakers ought to take this finding more seriously than they currently do, because it implies that simply placing a warning sign within someone's visual range offers no guarantee that it will be consciously registered. Designing safer environments, therefore, requires accounting for the limits of attention itself, not merely assuming that visibility alone ensures awareness.

When a country physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, he set in motion a medical revolution without fully understanding why it worked. (A) This method produced genuine successes, eventually eliminating smallpox worldwide and reducing diseases such as polio and measles, but each new vaccine still required years of laboratory work with no guarantee of success. (B) Advances in molecular biology eventually allowed researchers to isolate a single protein from a pathogen's surface, producing vaccines with fewer side effects, and the most recent shift toward delivering genetic instructions represents the latest chapter in this story. (C) For nearly two centuries afterward, vaccine development proceeded largely by trial and error, weakening or killing a pathogen and testing whether the resulting preparation could train the immune system without causing disease itself.

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body and placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, connecting its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly realistic sensations. (A) This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever prove that they are not that very brain right now? (B) The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. (C) Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be generated by the same simulation being tested.

Emissions trading, a market-based mechanism for curbing greenhouse gases, allows governments to set an overall limit on carbon output while letting firms trade permits within that limit. (A) Under this system, known as cap-and-trade, companies that cut emissions more cheaply than required can sell surplus allowances to firms facing higher reduction costs. Proponents argue that this flexibility lets society reach a given environmental target at the lowest overall cost, since abatement shifts toward whoever can achieve it most economically. (B) Consequently, many economists now advocate combining trading with a price floor, a minimum permit price that keeps the market from collapsing during weak demand, thereby preserving the cost-effectiveness for which trading is valued. (C) Critics, however, contend that trading schemes frequently allocate too many permits, a flaw that has historically depressed carbon prices and blunted incentives to invest in cleaner technology. For example, early phases of several regional markets granted allowances so generously that permit prices collapsed, leaving polluters with little pressure to change their practices.

Few ideas in policy debate provoke as much philosophical unease as the notion that a government might deliberately steer citizens toward better choices while leaving every option technically available. (A) Defenders insist that freedom is preserved as long as no option is banned and no penalty is attached, arguing that a citizen who is merely steered, rather than coerced, remains free to choose otherwise. (B) Critics counter that this defense rests on an impoverished notion of liberty, one that ignores how engineered defaults and calculated framing can shape decisions just as powerfully as an outright prohibition would. (C) The dispute ultimately turns on what freedom actually requires: the mere absence of coercion, or a decision-making process that remains transparent and undistorted.